1.5 Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Robert Browning is a major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and the Book (1868–69), the story of a Roman murder trial in 12 books.

Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them “Porphyria's Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning's new manner: they involve the reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up Men and Women (1855).

In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Only with the publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Browning achieve the sort of fame that Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the most extreme statement of Browning's celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.' ”

In The Ring and the Book Browning displays all his distinctive qualities. He allows a dramatic monologue to each character he portrays—to the man on trial for murder, to his young wife, whom he has mortally wounded, to her protector, to various Roman citizens, to the opposing lawyers, and to the pope, who ultimately decides the accused's fate. Each monologue deals with the same events, but each, of course, describes and interprets them differently. By permitting the true facts to appear gradually by inference from these conflicting stories, Browning reveals with the true natures of his characters. As each great monologue shows the moral being of the speaker, it becomes clear that nothing less than the whole ethical basis of human actions is in question. For over 20,000 lines Browning explores his theme, employing an unfaltering blank verse, rising often to passages of moving poetry, realizing in extraordinary detail the life of 17th-century Rome, and creating a series of characters as diverse and fully realized as those in any novel.

Few poets have suffered more than Browning from hostile incomprehension or misplaced admiration, both arising very often from a failure to recognize the predominantly dramatic nature of his work. The bulk of his writing before 1846 was for the theatre; thereafter his major poems showed his increasing mastery of the dramatic monologue. This consists essentially of a narrative spoken by a single character and amplified by his comments on his story and the circumstances in which he is speaking. From his own knowledge of the historical or other events described, or else by inference from the poem itself, the reader is eventually enabled to assess the intelligence and honesty of the narrator and the value of the views he expresses. This type of dramatic monologue, since it depends on the unconscious provision by the speaker of the evidence by which the reader is to judge him, is eminently suitable for the ironist. Browning's fondness for this form has, however, encouraged the two most common misconceptions of the nature of his poetry—that it is deliberately obscure and that its basic “message” is a superficial optimism. Neither of these criticisms is groundless; both are incomplete.