6.

Robert Brownings dramatic monologues: individualism, orality and post-romantic

irony (or poetry posited on the dangerous edge of things)

In his book of analyses titled Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics, and in the slightly
earlier four essays of the volume The Dialogic Imagination (books written forty years
before they became famous, in the 1960s and 1980s, through translations into French and
English first, Mikhail Bakhtin commends what was to be found in the Victorian age in
Robert Brownings poetry, too: the dialogical, conversational, oblique and in fact ironical
voice of poetry when centered around individual persons whose mind is caught in the act
of narrating itself at special (sometimes even sensational) moments. Brownings
introspective case studies in verse of the volumes Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic
Romances (1845), Men and Women , (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864) represent typical
dramatic monologues. The poems of this species were modern versions of prosopopoeia,
an ancient mode of writing poetry from behind a mask (prosopon meaning face in
ancient Greek. The dramatic effects of these monologues are due firstly to their
theatricality because, just as on stage, a dramatic monologue develops a conversation that
the reader is supposed to follow directly, in progress, in the present and without a
narrator. But whereas in regular stage-texts the dramatic quality is sustained by stage
directions and the stage itself (which is a place apart that holds up for contemplation the
characters involved in the plot which enacts the tension of the situations created), in the
dramatic monologues there is only a continuous transcription of an oral text to go by
(spoken by a single voice). The reader must pay attention to the details of the text,
connecting them, by deductions, to incidents that are only noticeable in the speech in
progress (either because they are explicitly narrated or because they intervene to change
the characters mood or to vary his responses to something that the reader can only
deduce). However, in the dramatic monologues (just as on stage), the reader is invited to
share directly in the responses to incidents, i.e., to identify with the speakers sentiments;
in addition, the dramatic monologue reader must imagine the gestures that accompany the
words so as to recognize the circumstances of the speaking voice and to reconstruct the
entire dramatic situation. Because it is written with no stage directions and without the
1

framing of events and exchanges in the world on an actual stage, the dramatic monologue
show prompts the readers to be always one step ahead of the words they are reading
and forces them to read between the lines, as if they were detectives reading clues. This is
why the dramatic monologue reads as a species of ironic literature. To decode a dramatic
monologue, one needs to detach the ground-level significance of the poems tenor from
the mesh of artifices composing the disturbed, difficult vehicle (or surface) of the poems.
The reader has to keep in mind the following points:

that there is an only speaking voice and a silent interlocutor;

that there are enough clues for characterizing the speaking voice through its
emotive accents and by imagining the gestures and the circumstances of the
speech;

that the speech develops a concrete, contingent, sometimes even random subject
in a subjective way (individualists are self-centred, modern, impredictable people)

that the speech a dramatic monologue develops is informal, even colloquial more
often than not and it is from the intuitive accents of this informal style that
everything about the speaker, the subjective circumstances and the objective
situation can be deduced;

that the subject is developed by digressions and often in dramatic, contradictory

ways ( this is so either because the speaker is in a state of stress, or because s/he
has a secret or some puzzling attitude or another to disclose);

that the ideal reader of a dramatic monologue has to accumulate enough detailed
observations and to interpret them justly;

that the dramatic monologue reader has to inevitably identify with the speaker
and become a kind of stage director ready to produce the text (or a specialized
reader).

Application of the dramatic monologue features to Brownings very short poem

My Last Duchess
If we follow the general list of clues outlined previously for the understanding of

the dramatic monologue, we discover first that the only speaking voice is that of the
Duke of Ferrara ( he refers to his last duchess by disclosing things about her to a silent

interlocutor, addressed as you, in a direct speech situation, as we read in lines 9 and 10:
since none puts by/The curtain I have drawn for you, but I; the speaker chooses to put
by/The curtain, and thereby implicitly declares that he is alone in control of his
communication at the beginning of the poem, sure of himself and haughty). But the
persistent occurrence of Fra Pandolphs name twice seems to trouble the speaker, as the
painter who mediated his relationship with the Duchess in the painting; Fra Pandolph, can
only be the painter introduced to the silent interlocutor, whose identity will remain
unknown until the end of the poem (in line 49, where we find out that he was an envoy of
the Count of Tirol, come to negotiate the Dukes next marriage). If we consider the clues
for characterizing the speaking voice through its emotive accents by imagining the
gestures and the circumstances of its speech, we understand, as early as the opening of
the poem, that the speakers irritation with Fra Pandolph for courting his own Duchess
about whom we learn that she tended to run counter to his great authority: Sir, twas
not/Her husbands presence only,[that] called that spot of joy into the Duchesss cheek
(lines 13-15); and perhaps the special charm of the Duchess glance in the picture came
from the compliment paid to her by Fra Pandolph in lines 17-19). The general dramatic
monologue reading-clue about the speech that develops a concrete, contingent,
sometimes even random subject in a subjective way points to the fact that the Duke is
venting his jealousy and his anger with the Duchess while presenting her beautiful
picture, which makes him recall her self, to the envoy so we are reading in dramatic
confession the content of a jealous male conscience, which feeds upon its own flames of
passion. But in line 20 the poem moves to a report about what the Duchess thought,
which places the male and the female consciences at odds: for while the Duke gets
angrier and angrier, the Duchess delight with the compliment called in her cheek a spot
of joy that was aesthetic rather than erotic, since the immediately following lines place
her joy at the painters courtesy in a larger context of beauty: the Duchess equally
enjoyed the beauty of nature and the courtesy of people around her: The dropping of the
daylight in the West/The bough of cherries some officious fool/Broke in the orchard for
her, the white mule/ She rode with round the terrace....(lines 26-29). Because the
Duchess attention rambles from his gift of a nine-hundred-years old name (line 33)
and from his favour at her breast and touches everything, the Duke is jealous of her

even now when she speaks (this can be proved by the fits of symbolic violence which
accompany his account of the Duchess deeds, especially in the Dukes labelling as an
officious fool of the page who offered the Duchess a bow of cherries one day. But the
poem does not develop solely, as a stage soliloquy would, a single weighty or
philosophical theme here, possibly jealousy; for the poem is more than a study of
jealousy, it may be an indirect study of femininity, a homage to the aesthetic sensibility of
women that men can hardly discern, being blinded by their haughtiness and obsessions,
especially when they are jealous. And the poem is also a case study in artistic sensibility
since the Duke is obviously an art collector and connaisseur, which points to a developed
aesthetic sensibility, but he is also a monster while being a lover of art, as can be seen by
the plot that insinuates itself into the picture, obliquely, in this dramatic monologue. The
signs of jealousy are mixed up with testimonies about beauty and with narratives of the
facts in this poem, which is disorderly, repetitive and contradictory, as all dramatic
monologues. It is as a kind of gossip that the incident of the poem is introduced: the
killing of the Duchess by the jealous Duke, who gave commands/ Then all smiles
stopped together (lines 45-46). The poem revolves around a scandalous, passional crime
but since it is the killer himself who tells us about his crime, it offers an account that
would justify the crime from the point of view of the criminal (just as at the beginning of
Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky). And indeed the account develops in an
informal, even colloquial vein it has no moral or judicial undertones but delivers
the news about the murder in a kind of sombre anecdote manner; it develops within the
account of the speakers subjective circumstances and allows the objective situation to
be deduced; this is why we recognize that the subject is developed by digressions and
often in dramatic, contradictory ways ( embedded in the conscience of the speaker who
does not feel guilty but triumphant after perpetrating this crime). If read attentively, the
dramatic monologue educates its ideal reader, ready to accumulate enough detailed
observations and to interpret them justly. The situation of the reader is baffling, because
s/he has to inevitably identify with the speaker, who is a murderer about to acquire a
new Duchess and about to subject her to a similar treatment though he has now
changed the circumstances to fit him better, because he is negotiating a marriage into the
upper classes and will take a Duchess that he need not judge for not appreciating the gift

of his nobility, bestowed upon her in marriage, above all other pleasures, so as to allow
any other pleasures to become guilty pleasures.
In the poem Fra Lippo Lippi, of the 1855 volume Men and Women, which came to be
regarded after the Victorian age as the best book of poetry published for the last two
centuries, the reader meets with a very unconventional monk, who has been caught by
guards in a back street after an assignation with a sportive lady and starts praising the
plenitude of Gods creation by demonstrating the virtues of realistic art as superior to the
devotional but conventional art preferred in convents. In fact, this poem stages a
conflictual performance of the Hellenism and Hebraism paradigms that Matthew Arnold
also thematised later, in Culture and Anarchy. Consequently, Fra Lippo Lippi should be
regarded as relevant for the confrontation of puritanism with hedonism in the 19th century.
As its integration in the cultural themes of the Victoriage is concerned, this poem by
Browning situates the readers in a region equivalent with that of Pre-Raphaelite art with
its desire to turn its face towards the Middle Ages and away from the Renaissance.
This desire had also been manifest in Brownings 1845 volume Dramatic
Romances, for example in the quest-poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The
protagonist of the quest poem is a childe or knight-learner, a young nobleman by birth
with a famous mediaeval name, who prepares, through ascesis, to pass the tests meant to
turn him into a heroic medieval figure, as the knight should be. Allegory was a literary
species very dear to the Middle Ages, where most of the texts were hermeneutically
interpretable, just like the Holy Scriptures, as texts with a key that hid a hierarchy of
secret meanings. But as a neo-mediaeval (or sentimentally mediaeval text, by Schillers
classification) Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is an ironical romance, i.e. a
satire (cf. Northrop Fryes essay I of the Anatomy of Criticism). The quest motif is
central to the poem but it is subordinated to the Victorian demonstration. The centrality of
the quest in mediaeval literature is transformed into a modern demonstration. As an
allegorical poem about the confused position of modern, lost humanity, the poem will
demonstrate that the quester is a loser, because not only does he find no real mediaeval
tower at the end of his journey, but the wager of his journey/quest is nil: he finds merely
chaotic darkness, which stands for modern bitter, irritating disappointment where the
Dark Tower should have stood to give strength to the idea of his coming/arrival. There is

no triumph but merely bitter disappointment to crown his journey that becomes a kind of
disappointing touristic trip.

In the original teaching unit dedicated to Robert Browning, the poem By the
Fireside served as the introduction to the poets mind and true values because it was not
an ironical dramatic monologue, but approached a soliloquy1. The theme of this long
poem was shown to be the contemplative soul of a man speaking for two after a life-long
love, the love of twin souls that identified and intensified each others thoughts. The
poem was shown to advance in stages from the fire-side towards continuously widening
worlds thanks to the reading of books (by the protagonist), Greek books, then through the
invocation of a life-time of love, ultimately becoming a journey in which the soul of man
confronts its elevated sources, the elevated region of its altitude.

XXVII
Think, when our one soul understands
The Great Word which makes all things new
When earth breaks up and Heaven expands
How will the change strike me and you
In the House not made with hands?

The advance of the soul towards sublime regions is also the theme of the ironical
poem about the artist Fra Lippo Lippi. Here as in the majority of his poems, Browning
chooses an odd character to makes the nice distinctions that lead the soul very high. The
1

The same hesitation between a dramatic monologue and a soliloquy is evident in the poem Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came in the volume Dramatic Romances, which is usually anthologized as a
third person narrative and in the ironical love-poem The Last Ride Together.

effect of this is that his poetry would be sentimental if it were not grotesque primarily.
And it is a considerable theatrical achievement to render fully human the last, most
distorted, most grotesque human being. Fra Lippo Lippi is a publicly reproachable
character caught when returning from an amorous encounter with the sportive ladies who
leave their doors ajar at the other end of the street of the Medici Familys residence. The
choice of this character to demonstrate the vistas and opening of the human soul
resembles Carlyles method in Sartor Resartus, which begins from the lowest level of
the philosophy of appearances, i.e., of satire dressed up in the burlesque, carnivalesque
garb (in the philosophy of clothes). Brownings dramatic strategy makes him start from
the margin in order to talk of the centre, by faithfully cataloguing each, and every, all
the material movements of this fabulous creature, the human soul.
After presenting his life story (he had been a poor boy of the streets, an Oliver
Twist, who had landed in a monastery which he used initially as a soup-canteen, because
he was starving; here he came to be used as a painter of frescoes because he doodled and
had a lively imagination; because in his realistic paintings he betrayed some of the
shameful secrets of the truthfully depicted abbot and his niece and refused to paint
according to the canons of theological painting, he was eventually kicked out of the
church and turned into the professional painter, in the service of the Medici family. He
painted as sensuously as any Renaissance painter but in his campaign he employed the
Pre-Raphaelite mysticism:
Cant I take breath and try to add lifes flash,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say theres beauty with no soul at all
(I never saw it put the case the same-)
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents:

Thats somewhat: and youll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself, when you return him thanks. (lines 213 219)

And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over,

The world and lifes too big to pass for a dream,
And I do these wild things in sheer despite,
And play the fooleries you catch me at,
In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the milller does not preach to him
The only good of grass is to make chaff.
What would men have? Do they like grass or no
May they or maynt they? All I wants the thing
Settled for ever one way. As it is,
You tell too many lies and hurt yourself:
You dont like what you only like too much,
You do like what, if given you at your word,
You find abundantly detestable.
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;

I always see the garden and God there

A-making mans wife: and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,
I cant unlearn ten minutes afterwards. (lines 250 269)
Brownings world is a typically hedonistic one, which overlooks the Puritans
obsession with the fall from paradise, imagining that man is still dwelling in the
Garden of Eden.
But there are numerous poems by Browning which are set in the petty every-day
hell from where they extract exemplary lessons about the overwhelming mystery of
the human soul and its infinity. In Porphyrias Lover, a man in love strangles his
beloved and adores the look in her dead eyes because he sees himself adored and
eternally praised in the dead womans ever-lasting last glance.
In The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxeds Church, we meet with a lover
of art and life talking only about worldly things on his deathbed, which is a scandalous
situation in the life of a bishop. But nobody is shocked at the general situation and at the
dying ecclesiastics ramblings because of the subject matter that the speaker chooses to
develop, which is the capacity to relish art and beauty as supreme values in life. Before
passing any judgments, one feels bound to identify with the bishops love of art, of black
marble and the lapis lazuli lump and the sublime, angelic light filling the church, as he
speaks like a Renaissance man, whose refined senses, admire the world as a connaisseur
and an art collector.