THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

may noisily explode in its vexation and may insist on a sharing of the indignation, but ‘De Gustibus’ gives a very
different impression of emerging from quieter, amorous discourse shaped around the oppositions of England and
Italy. ‘Two in the Campagna’ opens with a questioning voice reminiscent of Donne’s, but it speaks of distinctness not
union, of an agnosticism in love not of ideal convergence. The famous ‘Home — Thoughts, from Abroad’ opens with
a gasped aspiration and refers possessively to ‘my blossomed pear-tree’ and to a ‘you’ who might think the thrush
incapable of recapturing ‘the first careless rapture’. The narrator of the children’s poem ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
talks of ‘my ditty’ and ends addressing ‘Willy’ on the virtues of keeping faith with pipers. Browning’s most elusive
and suggestive poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has a first-person narrator who draws us into his quest
by suggesting an eerily Gothic response to an already posed question:
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
The poem takes its suggestive title from one of Edgar’s songs in King Lear, but the line provides merely a footing
on which Browning builds a complex fabric, vaguely medieval in its setting but ominous and disturbing in its precise
evocation of horror (‘— It may have been a water-rat I speared, | But, ugh! It sounded like a baby’s shriek’, ‘Toads in
a poisoned tank, | Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage’). In a sense the poem circles back to its title as the knight blows
his ‘slughorn’, announcing both his presence and his recognition of how and why he framed his journey. Unlike the
narrators of Browning’s other poems, the very strangeness of the knight and his quest preclude the familiar; a reader
is alienated, not by a character, but by an impersonality and by receding layers of ‘truth’ and ‘lying’ which look
forward to the experiments of the early twentieth-century Modernists.
The Drama, the Melodrama, and the ‘Sensation’ Novel
Robert Browning’s tragedy Strafford had been conceived and written in the mid-1830s at the earnest request of the
great actor William Charles Macready. Macready was a determined and intelligent pillar of the English stage, a
committed reformer and performer of the Shakespearian repertoire as much as a patron of new national talent.
Strafford pleased him, though he confessed on
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his first reading of the play that he had been ‘too much carried away by the truth of character to observe the meanness
of plot, and occasional obscurity’. It needed substantial revision before it reached the stage of the Covent Garden
Theatre in April 1837. It has very rarely been performed since. Macready also directed, and took the leading roles in,
other now-forgotten plays by Victorian writers whose reputations today are exclusively based on their work in other
media. The most notable of these was the historical novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote The Lady of Lyons;
or, Love and Pride for Macready in 1838, following it in 1839 with the tragedy Richelieu. Both dramas remained
standard repertory pieces throughout the century, attracting actors of the standing of Charles Kean, Helen Faucit, and
later Henry Irving and Ellen Terry to its star roles. Irving, the leading Shakespearian actor of the second half of the
century, was also instrumental in the honourable, if unacclaimed, staging of Tennyson’s sprawling verse-drama
Queen Mary in 1876. In 1893, after the poet’s death, Irving took the lead in the more favourably received Becket, the
second of Tennyson’s three epic dramas concerned with turning-points in English history. The shade of Shakespeare
haunts the theatrical work of all those Victorian writers, from Bulwer-Lytton to Swinburne, who attempted to evolve a
modern equivalent to his tragedies and history plays. The scrupulous, scholarly, elaborate, and often admirable
productions of Shakespeare which so mark the history of the theatre in the nineteenth century tended to smother all
serious imitation under the weight of fussy period costumes, archaeologically correct properties, and an appropriately
fustian language.
The Victorian theatre evolved a far more fluid and inventive comic style than it did a tragic one. Although Charles
Dickens dabbled unprofitably with burlesque in the mid-1830s, he clearly sensed that neither his talent nor his power
to make money lay in that direction. Where the dialogue in his early sketches and novels is vivid, that in his plays is
stilted and contrived; the conventions that he transforms in his fiction remain irredeemably conventional in his stageworks.
Dickens’s friend Douglas Jerrold (1803-57) proved a far more successful writer of comedy. His farce Paul Pry