THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

viewpoint is multiple, the effect cumulative, and the narrative line, or lines, require exploration rather than mere
imaginative sympathy or suspension of disbelief. Browning (1812-89) obliges his reader to play the role of an alert
investigating magistrate, probing confessions and impressions and sifting a weight of contradictory evidence. The
Ring and the Book is the culmination of his long poetic experiment with the dramatic monologue and of his
fascination with the establishment of ‘truth’, a truth that can be both objective and subjective, external and
experiential. In 1860 Browning had discovered the source for his poem, a collection of documents, bound together,
concerning a sensational Roman murder trial of 1698. This chance find on a Florentine bookstall appealed to
Browning’s delight in exploring the self justifying contortions of the minds of sinners and criminals; it also
stimulated his intellectual and poetic curiosity. The finished poem is as layered as a texture of voices, each of the
narratives qualifying and expanding on the one preceding it, each of his witnesses opening up freshly complex vistas
and new questions.
The Ring and the Book appeared in four volumes over a period of as many months, thus signalling to its first
readers its relationship to the contemporary serial novel. Browning’s reputation as a major poet was already firmly
established, based on what are still recognized as his four most important volumes of verse, Dramatic Lyrics (1842),
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), and Dramatis Personae (1864). As the titles of these
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volumes suggest, the nature of drama, or rather the characters of drama, served to stimulate Browning’s most
distinctive writing. In spite of his early ambition to write for the stage, and the modest success of his play Strafford
(1837), his real penchant was for scenes and for monologues divorced from the theatre. The characters of his poetry
do not necessarily have to interact with others, for the majority are overheard in self revelatory, if scarcely truthtelling
soliloquy. The situations he presents, however, require a reader's complicity. In the case of Fra Lippo Lippi, a
compromised painter in holy orders forces his confession on those who discover him, ‘at an alley’s end | Where
sportive ladies leave their doors ajar’. In ‘My Last Duchess’ participation is yet more uneasy. As the Duke of Ferrara
gradually explains both himself and the select contents of his privy chamber, a reader is cast in the role of listening
ambassador opening the preliminaries to the acquisition of the next duchess (the last one having been disposed of).
The Duke's menace, like his cultivation, is established cumulatively:
She thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? ...
. . . . .
and I choose
Never to stoop. O sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.
In many instances Browning wrenches us into a troubled private history by making that history work itself out
before us. It is the method of Sir Walter Scott returned to its proper origins in the drama of Shakespeare, and
remoulded into single charged incidents recounted by single, expressive voices. Even when Browning’s soliloquizers
are not known historical figures, as in the instances of the unnamed monk in his Spanish cloister or of the Bishop
ordering his tomb, he establishes a physical context through carefully selected details, references, or objects. None
floats in the relatively unlocated realms of Tennyson’s Ulysses and Tithonus. Each of the speaking voices is given an
individual articulation, a turn of phrase, an emphasis, a pause, a reiteration, or an idiolect which serves to identify
them. Significantly, most of them are connoisseurs (like the Duke), artists, musicians, thinkers or even, in the case of
Mr Sludge the Medium, manipulators. A creativity, or at least an appreciation of the creative process, marks the
individuality of each of them. Even Browning’s theologians, from the worldly Bishop Bloughram and the earthy
Caliban to the more spiritual Rabbi Ben Ezra and Johannes Agricola, speculate from a physical base in the world of
the senses or from an appreciation of sensual experience.
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Those poems of Browning’s which dispense with an identified persona as narrator generally retain a
conversational directness, even an easy familiarity between addresser and addressee. ‘The Lost Leader’, for example,